Page 261 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

had begun to decline. Chu Yen published his T'ao-shuo in 1774,
while the Ching-te-chen t'ao-lu written by Lan P'u did not appear
till 1815. The most valuable description, however, is that con-
tained in two letters written by the French Jesuit Pcrc d'Entrc-
colles, who was in China from 1698 to 1741 and not only had in-
fluential friends at court but also many converts among the
humble artisans in the factories at Ching-te-chen. These letters,
dated 1712 and 1722, give a vivid picture of the whole process of
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manufacture, of which he was an intelligent observer. He re-
counts how the petuntse ("china stone") and kaolin ("china clay")
are quarried and prepared, and the enormous labour involved in
kneading the clay. He describes a degree of specialisation among
the decorators so minute that it is a wonder the painting has any
life at all: "One workman does nothing but draw the first colour
line beneath the rims of the pieces; another traces flowers, while a
third one paints. . . . The men who sketch the outlines learn
sketching, but not painting; those who paint [i.e., apply the col-
our] study only painting, but not sketching," all in the interests of
absolute uniformity. Elsewhere he says that a single piece might
pass through the hands of seventy men. He speaks of the hazards
of the kiln and of how a whole firing is often lost by accident or
miscalculation. He tells how the emperor would send down Sung
Dynasty kuan, Ju, Ting, and Ch'ai wares to be copied, and of the
gigantic fishbowls ordered by the palace which took nineteen days
to fire. The greatest challenge, however, was set by the agents of
the European merchants at Canton who demanded openwork
lanterns, tabletops, and even musical instruments in porcelain. As
early as 1635 the Dutch were forwarding, via Formosa, wooden
models of the shapes of vessels required. We can get some idea of
the extent of the foreign trade from the fact that in 1643 no fewer
than 129,036 pieces of porcelain were sent via Formosa to the
Dutch governor-general of Batavia for shipment to Holland.
Most of it must have been produced at Ching-te-chen.
The most beautiful K'ang-hsi wares, and those which have been K'ANG-HSl PERIOD
most admired in both China and the West, are the small mono- WARES
chromes, which in their classic perfection of form, surface, and
colour recapture something of the subtlety and restraint of the
Sung. The T'ao-lu says that Ts'ang Ying-hsiian s clays were rich,
his glazes brilliant, his porcelain thin-bodied, and that he devel-
oped four new colours—eel-skin yellow, spotted yellow, snake-
skin green, and turquoise blue. He also perfected a mirror black
which was often decorated with gold; an exquisite soft red shading
to green known as peach-bloom and used, it seems, for a very
small range of vases and vessels for the scholar's desk; an "imperial
yellow"; and a clear, powder blue, blown on through a bamboo
tube and then often painted with arabesques in gold. The latter
were especially admired in France, where it was the fashion to
mount them in ormolu. The most splendid effect was a rich red
produced from copper, known in Europe as sang-de-boeuf ("ox-
blood") and in China as Lang-yao; several members of the Lang
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